Climate Change and Pasadena’s General Plan: What Would It Take? The Carbon Neutral City

California and Pasadena are committed to “green” environmental policies. But a lot of the beneficial changes we’ve enacted––the bag ban, 10% renewable energy, green building codes, etc.––are a drop in the bucket compared to the elephant in the room: our Land Use policies.

Downtown Pasadena is sustainable because it is a compact, walkable urban neighborhood that is connected to Greater Los Angeles via the Gold Line.

That is, does Pasadena’s zoning code encourage people to live in a sustainable manner––walking, biking, using public transportation, with only occasional automobile use––or does it contribute to the sprawl of suburban development, where low density makes frequent automobile trips an unavoidable necessity of daily life?

Downtown Pasadena, as a compact, walkable urban neighborhood served by the Gold Line, is uniquely able to provide the right kind of housing that isn’t auto-dependent. Because our apartments, office buildings, shops, and other buildings are so closely-spaced, Downtown Pasadena is sustainable (although there is still substantial improvements that could be made). Our sustainability/walkability is rare. Outside of a few pockets inside of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Long Beach, much of the rest of Southern California is dismally auto-dependent and unsustainable.

The choice presented by the General Plan is: Do we want to maximize Downtown Pasadena’s unique opportunity by allowing additional housing growth Downtown, or do we want to clamp the lid shut and say to prospective new residents, “Sorry, there’s no more room for you.”

The larger issue in terms of climate change and sustainable planning is regional. Will Pasadena step up and provide a place to live for people who want to become a 1-car household, commute via the Gold Line, or perhaps get rid of all their autos altogether? Will Downtown Pasadena have room for people who may be living in auto-dependent Rancho Cucamonga, Irvine, Glendora, etc. or even East Pasadena to move here and ditch their car? We should.

Condominiums (i.e. the Montana Residences) with ground-floor retail & services (i.e. Euro Pane Bakery) that are within convenient walking distance to work, shops, and the Gold Line, are sustainable. More residential development in Downtown Pasadena will decrease emissions and energy use because the compact urban use of land gets people out of their cars.

Pasadena’s General Plan, therefore, should significantly expand or eliminate the cap on residential development in Downtown Pasadena. The General Plan should continue the policy, affirmed by voters, of Guiding Principle #1, which states that “Growth will be targeted… [and] higher density development will be directed into our Downtown…”

Not only is increased urban density in Downtown Pasadena the sustainable policy, it also results in a higher quality of life for both Downtown residents, and for residents living in the surrounding single-family homes, too.

The following article does such a good job of outlining the need for a dense, compact urban core for Pasadena, that it deserves reposting here.

…the best thing a city can do [to become a Carbon Neutral City] is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it’s the only universal strategy that works. That’s the best-documented finding in urban planning—that as density goes up, trip length goes down and transportation energy use goes down. The main question that nearly every city in North America needs to address is how to densify quickly.

Once people are grappling with that, though, there are other things people need to do to make that work: making neighborhoods walkable, with green spaces, street life, mixed-use zoning and other qualities that make a place livable. If you have density without that, you just have vertical suburbs.

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the ’60s and ’70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist. We know that dense cities are both environmentally better and dramatically more equitable places. Walkable neighborhoods are better than the suburbs for people with a wide range of incomes, and what happens in cities that don’t grow is that they gentrify and poor people are pushed out. Trying to fight change makes you less sustainable and more unfair.

There’s a great plan for the city of Melbourne… The city’s growing quickly, needs to add a million people over the next decade or two, but they don’t want that to be sprawl. So they took a digital map of the city and blocked off everything that’s currently single-family residences, everything that’s a historical building, everything that’s green space, working industrial land, and other things people are vociferous about valuing. That left a fairly small percentage of land. But they showed that if they concentrated density in those corridors, they could add a million people without expanding the city at all, and it would add all these benefits, like better public transit and such.

You can dramatically increase the density of places without taking away things people want—and actually adding things they want but couldn’t afford today—because the average suburb isn’t dense enough to financially support a tram or the like. But if you add a dense core that can support that, suddenly even the people around it, in their single-family homes, get the benefit, too. I call that “tent-pole density,” where extremely high density in a small area brings up the average for a whole neighborhood, even when the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t change. I think it’s a really important concept, one that most people don’t get.

We’ve run out of time for incremental approaches. For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change—sharing goods, etc.—but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.

“This sounds counter-intuitive, but taller buildings that are part of a walkable, transit-oriented community can actually help ease congestion. In a denser urban world, people will walk to work, clearing up traffic congestion. That time commuters spent in their cars they can instead spend with their families. Now they’re happier. And with all these happy people living in such close proximity to each other, dense communities can support more retail, more restaurants, more transit, more tax base, all of which serves to attract yet more people and businesses.”

General Plan Workshop – Saturday, March 10th

Come to a community workshop to discuss the objectives and policies that make up the General Plan’s Land Use and Mobility Chapters. The Land Use Chapter outlines how and where we should grow and the Mobility Chapter guides the safe and efficient movement of people and goods throughout the City. We need to attend this workshop to urge continued sustainable investment in Downtown through increased residential caps!

5 thoughts on “Climate Change and Pasadena’s General Plan: What Would It Take? The Carbon Neutral City”

Jonathan – great job!! Now if we can get our single family neighborhood owners to understand the urban concept and how it can help make their neighborhoods more sustainable without disturbing “their” environment.
Marilyn

Jonathan great work as usual. My experience is that for sustainability to work then we need a 3-pronged approach that includes not just ‘environmental’, but also ‘fiscal’ and ‘cultural’ sustainability. Not everyone is an ‘environmentalist’ just as many others are not ‘economists’. As Marilyn suggests, the biggest hurdle for Pasadena remains in addressing its ‘cultural’ issues, and therefore, the limitations of rapid densification. But the cultural issues in Pasadena go beyond the urban identification with architecture, landscape and streetscape, and may have something to do with maintaining historical social, economic and demographic issues. If there is anyone in our group capable of discussing these issues in such a manner that is enlightening, then a great portion of the convincing could be done and our city will have begun a paradigm shift into real urbanization. Thoughts?

Yes, I agree. Some of the previous general plan discussions referred to sustainability as comprised of “the 3 Es: Environment, Economy, And Equity”. Sustainable planning takes into account all 3 components. A project that results in a good economic return should not harm the environment or cause social inequity. A project that doesn’t make sense economically can’t move forward, either.
Your idea of a “cultural” component of sustainability is a new way of looking at it, however, that I really like. I think that there is a wide consensus in Pasadena that we value the Pasadena “brand” that has developed around our rich cultural history, including the notable and distinctive architecture that is unique to Pasadena, the traditions of great achievement such as the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl, the “East Coast” sensibilities that are evident in our lush landscaping, and a sense that our politics and civic culture has been characterized by civility and general harmony.
Adding “Culture” as a part of “Sustainability” would mean that we also must evaluate all decisions in terms of their impact upon culture.
Again, I totally agree with that idea. The DPNA’s Mission/Working General Principles includes the following, which I think addresses your point:
“3. Downtown Pasadena will be the urban expression of a gentle city, maintaining its’ well-loved beautiful landmarks, historic buildings, mature trees, and green lawns & shrubbery. It will be clean, safe, and leisurely. Downtown residents will be engaged in the community, actively supporting cultural and civic institutions.”
I think that some Pasadena residents, noting how important our history is to us, think that all new development detracts from the Pasadena brand, and therefore we should just attempt to “freeze” the city in time, in effect turning it into a museum city. Or, they look to some major product projects that have been built the last 10 years––ones that are admittedly of very poor quality and not worthy of the Pasadena brand––and believe that the best way to prevent further occurrences of this nature it to simply halt all further development. I think that would be a disaster, and the city would simply rot in place. The cultural vitality that we all enjoy requires renewing and reinvestment. It took energy and effort by noble individuals to create what we currently have, and it takes energy and effort to maintain that, and to continue that same spirit of creation.
When we speak of additional housing in Downtown Pasadena, then, we want high-quality housing, buildings of architectural significance.

Addressing this cultural issue is ambassadorial (if thats a word). What I mean is that as we build bridges with the neighborhoods/folks that feel they are unlike the DPNA then as a group we should begin to develop a common and cultural language with these entities. Now I’m not the best candidate to do so because like many(?) residents of the DPNA district I moved here from another high-density city to set up my roots 12 years ago and by stating this then I could be considered a ‘threat’. However, there are many people w/in our group who do have the experience necessary whether they have moved from other Pasadena neighborhoods to DPNA, or have simply been residents a long time and I would encourage a detailed conversation to bring out the required language. For example, the rise and fall of Pasadena’s historical downtown (railway stop & hotel are known, but their significance less so) is rarely part of the discussion. As we unfold this history, it seems to become obvious that many things that the PDNA is seeking is actually a return to our natural heritage…

Yes, I think that the DPNA is absolutely seeking a return to Pasadena’s natural heritage. The streetcar that we propose is a return of the Red Car and other historical modes of transportation. (No talk of horses yet, however. :-)). Walking is the most fundamental human mode of transportation. I think that some day our descendents will look upon the era of the automobile–in which cities and all of life revolves around 95+% auto transport– as an aberration of history, a nice idea that had unintended consequences and which couldn’t last due to the natural resources that it sucked from the earth.

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